Medical instruments configured as gripping instruments are used in particular in endoscopic surgery to grasp tissue or comparable biological material. The gripping instruments customarily used in the art comprise rigid jaw members, which have no flexibility with respect to the object that is to be grasped. From the traction between the jaw members and the grasped object, point loads can develop that can cause damage to the grasped object, for example a blood vessel.
Patent DE 10 2007 026 721 A1 discloses a shape-adaptive medical gripping instrument, which makes use of the Fin Ray Effect to avoid these disadvantageous point loads between the jaw members of the gripping instrument and the grasped object and essentially to convert them into a form lock.
The Fin Ray Effect refers to a double-layered structure that performs a directed deformation through force impact, for example by sidestepping in the force contact point and at its ends turning against the force direction, and thus adapts to the shape of the object that induces the force.
Adaptive gripping tools known in the art have the disadvantage, however, that the inner and outer cheeks of the jaw members, produced from a flat binding material, have a low dimensional stability, in particular with respect to torsion impact.
On this basis, it is the object of the invention to provide a medical instrument of the aforementioned type, whose jaw members while maintaining flexibility have a high dimensional stability, in particular with respect to torsion impact.